As the wealth stampeded out of Detroit mid-dance, they left behind all their trappings, as seen in the ballroom of the Lee Plaza Hotel, a 15-story art deco luxury, full-service apartment building built in the glory days of 1929 and abandoned in the 1990s.

Cry, our beloved Detroit. It’s so easy to forget your heyday, when you rivaled other major cities with your grand architecture and the wealth coursing through your streets and powerful offices, the shining example of industry and efficiency.

The desolation of Detroit has previously been compared pictorially with the aftermath of Nagasaki. However, a shocking new book of photos, The Ruins of Detroit, taken by 20-something French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, show the truth of such analogies. Picture after picture in this book tells the heartbreaking story of a city soiled and abandoned.

In the biology classroom of Highland Park's George W Ferris School, one can almost hear the echoes of the droning instruction moments before everyone fled. It's hard to tell who ran out first: the students or the teachers. It is evident that even the janitorial staff was too fearful to ever return again.

It’s as if the occupants grew disgusted and simply walked away, leaving all their possessions behind to rot and fester.

The moldering remains are emblematic of a society that grew lazy and couldn’t bother to fend for itself. The photos show it was even too much effort to try to salvage what’s left.

These photos present a cautionary tale, which will likely continue to go unheeded. Detroit has been under Democratic rule since 1962, nearly half a century. And yet, the residents, seeing their city fall to the ground around them, continue to elect Democrats and expect a different result.

The remnants of the closed Highland Police Station illustrate the absolute neglect and chaos of the city and its utter disregard for law and order. It's clear that no one saw anything worth saving here, from the furniture and fixtures to the victims who cried out for their help.

The BlogProf has a eye-popping collection of links that demonstrate the absolute devastation that Detroit has given itself over to.

This story wasn’t run in the American mainstream media, where the shame of Detroit is swept under the obituary page. Instead it was told in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, which offers a fuller selection of the photos from the book. The book itself is not readily available in the US, though it can be purchased at the UK Amazon site.

Built 100 years ago, the Gothic Revival--style Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church quietly falls into shambles with no parishoners left to pray for it.

The equipment remains plugged in at a forsaken dentist's office in Detroit's Broderick Tower.

This sense of loss is what Marchand and Meffre have captured in image after image, whether of vast downtown vistas where every tower block is boarded-up or ravaged interior landscapes where the baroque stonework, often made from marble imported from Europe, is slowly crumbling and collapsing. The pair have photographed once-grand hotels that were built in a carefree mix of gothic, art deco, Moorish and medieval styles, as well as countless baroque theatres, movie houses and ballrooms —the Vanity, where big band giants such as Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey played in the 1930s; the Eastown theatre, where pioneering hard rock groups like Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 held court in the 1960s.

They have also captured for posterity the desolate interiors that once made up the city’s civic infrastructure: courthouses, churches, schools, dentists, police stations, jails, public libraries and swimming pools, all of which have most of their original fixtures and fittings intact. “As Europeans, we were looking with an outsider’s eye, which made downtown Detroit seem even more strange and dramatic,” says Meffre. “We are not used to seeing empty buildings left intact. In Europe, salvage companies move in immediately and take what they can sell as antiques. Here, they only take the metal piping to sell for scrap. In the Vanity ballroom alone, we saw four giant art deco chandeliers, beautiful objects, each one unique. It was almost unbelievable that they could still be there. It is as if America has no sense of its own architectural history and culture.”

In the story, the two young photographers, Marchand and Meffre, and how they stumbled upon Detroit from Paris were described thusly:

Marchand (29) and Meffre (23) have been taking photographs together since they first met in 2002. They are both children of Paris’s banlieue, hailing from the southern suburbs of the city. Without formal training, they describe themselves as “autodidacts who share an obsession with ruins”, which, says Meffre, “allow you to appear to enter a different world, a lost world, and to report back from there”.

Having photographed old buildings – “mainly disused theatres” – in Paris, they happened upon an image of Michigan Central train station in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures of abandoned buildings. “It was so stately and so dramatic that we decided right then we had to go,” says Meffre, “but we were naive; we had no idea of the scale of the project, of the vastness of downtown Detroit and its ruins. There is nothing comparable in Europe.”

The books await patrons that will never come again to the East Side Public Library.

Poor Detroit. The last one out didn’t even remember to turn off the lights or close the door.

A devastating indictment of Detroit’s abandonment of civilization in all sectors. What an immense waste! How can the citizens there defend such appalling behavior? The new Dark Age has begun in Detroit.